A kernel level message passing service

Bryce Bockman wrote:
>> I have recently become aware of work being done to incorporate certain
> types of services (ex: web servers) into the kernel of unix systems, so
> as to take away a level of abstraction, and eliminate the overhead in
> performing system calls from user space, thus creating a more efficient
> server.
>> My question is this:
>> Does is make sense that this sort of thing could be applied to a message
> passing interfaces for any sizable gain in performance? If so, is there
> any work already being done on this topic?
>> My initial reaction to the thought is that there would be all kinds of
> security issues, but maybe some sort of "safe" API could be developed to
> address these issues.
I think, at least at first blush, that this could be a really welcome
addition for those of us performing message passing and using scalable
parallelism in this forum (OK, flashy words to say, "All of us."). That
said, I think we need to think through this and see if it would be
something Linus could implement into a production kernel without
forking, or would we cause a kernel fork that would cause us to lose the
benefit of continued development, and have to reintegrate the messaging
functionality patch into each subsequent release?
Gerry
--
Gerry Creager gerry at cs.tamu.edu, gerry at page4.cs.tamu.edu
Network Engineering |Research focusing on
Academy for Advanced Telecommunications |Satellite Geodesy and
and Learning Technologies |Geodetic Control
Texas A&M University 979.458.4020 (Phone) -- 979.847.8578 (Fax)